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Is Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (NYSE:RCL) a buy here? The best stock pickers are turning less bullish. The number of bullish hedge fund bets shrunk by 13 in recent months. RCL was in 26 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of September. There were 39 hedge funds in our database with RCL positions at the end of the previous quarter. At the end of this article we will also compare RCL to other stocks including Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A), Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:IBKR), and Viacom, Inc. (NASDAQ:VIAB) to get a better sense of its popularity.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 18% gains over the past 12 months, more than doubling the 8% returns enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs.

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With all of this in mind, we’re going to take a look at the latest action encompassing Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (NYSE:RCL).

How have hedgies been trading Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (NYSE:RCL)?

At Q3’s end, a total of 26 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were bullish on this stock, a plunge of 33% from the previous quarter. With hedge funds’ positions undergoing their usual ebb and flow, there exists a few notable hedge fund managers who were boosting their holdings considerably (or already accumulated large positions).
When looking at the institutional investors followed by Insider Monkey, Principal Global Investors’s Columbus Circle Investors has the most valuable position in Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (NYSE:RCL), worth close to $98.6 million, corresponding to 1.1% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Citadel Investment Group, managed by Ken Griffin, which holds an $82.3 million position; the fund has 0.1% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Remaining peers with similar optimism contain Richard Barrera’s Roystone Capital Partners, John W. Rogers’s Ariel Investments and Brett Barakett’s Tremblant Capital.